Picturesque Farming: The Sound of ‘Happy Britannia’ in Colonial Australia

Peter Denney

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i3.2858

Abstract

This essay examines the way in which the British landscape tradition influenced perceptions of sound, noise and silence in colonial Australia, focusing on representations of rural soundscape in art and literature. It argues that poets and artists attempted to recreate an image of Australia as a new ‘Happy Britannia’, a noisy society engaged in virtuous agricultural labour. But this image was opposed to the prevailing taste for picturesque landscape, which accorded little value to human activity and placed great emphasis on silent, rural scenery. Accordingly, colonial perceptions of soundscape were ambivalent, as human-produced noise was heard as both a sign of the progress of civilisation and an obstacle to the spread of cultural refinement.

Highlights

In 1832, James Bischoff waxed lyrically on the capabilities and improvements of the newly appropriated lands of Tasmania
Dramatic had been the transformation, he continued, that much of the island resembled the cultivated countryside memorialised in John Dyer’s mid eighteenth-‐century poem, The Fleece, a poem set in Herefordshire, the British county most frequently celebrated as the embodiment of Happy Britannia, a mythical land of peace and prosperity.[1]
As numerous scholars have noted, colonial perceptions of the Australian natural environment were informed by a predominantly British landscape aesthetic, which triumphed in the late eighteenth century.[4]

Summary

Introduction

It begins by providing an outline of the process by which the development of picturesque landscape taste in eighteenth-‐century Britain coincided with a shift from an acoustic to a visual mode of knowing and valuing the land and its society, leading to a change in the dominant image of the countryside, from noisy to quiet.

Results

Conclusion